


Aristotle's Logic (or: Protasis, Sumperasma)

by grayglube



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt and Very Little Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-15 18:32:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7233919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn’t bury Simon in consecrated earth. And, she’s too much of a coward to stake him herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aristotle's Logic (or: Protasis, Sumperasma)

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt: She chooses to not bring Simon back.... What happens to Clary Fray in a world without Simon Lewis? Who does she become... or what? 
> 
> on lj

All she hears is, ‘ _emotions cloud judgement.’_

She doesn’t bury Simon in consecrated earth. And, she’s too much of a coward to stake him herself.

Alec does it for her. Alec does it because he loves Jace, but also because he understands.

He knows what it would do to her if it had been Jace. Alec knows what it’s like to love someone and have there be no exchange.

It’s the moment when she changed, standing in Simon’s room, broken glass under her boots, the desk cracked down the middle in her periphery. She decided then.

She made the wrong choice.

Standing in the cemetery she almost couldn’t decide, she did and then she couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t. The perimeter lit up red, too many downworlders come and gone, taking Camille’s remains with them, Raphael sticking around.

She could lie and say she was forced because of the eyes on her. Valentine’s daughter, what else could she do. Jace, Isabelle, Alec, and the three in the distance she’d never met; Lydia and the Lightwoods.

Maybe it’s not a lie.

She’d thought about Simon. Made the choice for him, not for herself.

But she wonders if Luke, in the moments he made a choice between living and dying, wished her mother was there with him, wishing she hadn’t walked away and shut a door to let him decide

She knows from growing up the way Luke looked at her mom and the way her mother looked back that something was missing, or broken.

It was hope, it was gone.

If she buried Simon she knows she’d have had to choose later. Simon would have to go on. She’d die one day, he’d live. He’s her best friend, had been. How could he live if she didn’t? She would chose Jace, then they’d both die, but Simon would go on forever.

It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair.

She choose what’s best, what’s selfish, and she buries Simon, alone. He’s dead. Truly dead, no audience needed.

Everyone wonders for their own reasons if it’s for the best or a sign of the worst that she’s let someone else put her best friend out of his misery.

Jace tells her that: “Not everyone is going to be satisfied.” She is silent in the cemetery. Knees pressed under her nose, against her mouth, her breath muggy on her own skin.

“Please leave.”

He looks hurt and she doesn’t feel anything.

She thinks of Simon’s mother, his sister, Maureen, and of herself. She thinks of her final ties to everything Mundane. All the things she won’t ever be again.

The fairytale world she grew up in is gone, a shattered mirror and what’s left is the reality of the monsters she’s been born to do battle with in some secret, poetic way the rest of the world is ignorant of.

The looks on the faces she sees when she returns all seem self-important, as if they really are great protectors.

She settles in among them and feels like she should be judged, that she isn't absolved of anything no matter how many people squeeze her shoulder or nod solemnly as she passes.

Venom sits on her tongue, acidic, spiteful words about how for a world they are supposed to protect they treat it as if it's full of disposible lives with little _real_ meaning.

She isolates herself in a circle of people who think they stand a world above others and the guilt settles in behind the sudden indifference.

* * *

“You made the right choice. The only choice.”

“It was _a_ choice.” Just like the life she lives now is a life, it wasn’t only the only one.

Maryse’s mouth puckers but she says no more.

“You did the right thing, Clary.”

Clary inhales deeply, “Fuck you.” She walks away. Jace stares at her like a dog she forgot to feed, Alec doesn’t look at her at all, Isabelle’s face is pale and indistinct without its contour and blush, her red lips look ludicrous.

Lydia finds her, sits silently on the broken steps outside the institute next to a broken girl.

Clary knows she isn’t the only one who has lost something that belonged to a different life, there are plenty of similar stories. So, Clary asks, “What did you do after?”

“I found things that filled the time”

“Like what?”

“Just things, anything.” Lydia negates herself, shakes her head and self-corrects, “All the things he wished I would take a bigger break from. Things I ignored him for, sometimes.” Lydia shrugs.

Feeling close to Simon is a wound so Clary climbs up off the crumbling stairs outside the institute and returns to the surveillance room. It’s another wound, watching the replay. She apologizes to Maryse, tells Isabelle her hair looks good. She nods at Alec’s assertion that she should remain behind for the next mission. Next to Jace she sways close, she stares back when he smiles even if she can’t return it.

Later she’ll press close, in the empty hall she lets Jace turn her to the wall and she'll lick her way past his lips.

When her eyes slip open his own are already waiting, she reaches for the back of his head but he pulls away.

His hands hold up the wall beside her head, “You don’t have to be alright Clary, you and Simon,” he can’t keep talking.

She makes her fingers pull close, his hair in her fist, “Don’t talk about him.” When she kisses him again. His teeth press to her lip and she lifts up to her toes, he slumps forward, it feels like she’s suffocating, slowly, like she’s being buried alive.

Jace is hard, she’s getting wet and it seems very easy to forget about the choice she’s made.

* * *

She’s in the infirmary. She stares at the light fixtures until tears form from the strain and roll over her temples, there are spots of sunburst colors in the pattern of the ceiling tiles when she shuts her eyes.

“That was too close Clary.” Jace says.

He sits next to the bed and she pretends he isn’t there. She’d been stupid on the last misson, she doesn’t need a reminder or the scrutiny. The risks never seem like real risks, they seem like she’s doing the right thing, if it isn’t her it will have to be someone else.

Her arm is broken and he keeps looking at where it’s wrapped, it will heal fast but it hurts while it pulls itself back together.

* * *

He told her they shouldn’t be doing what they did.

She could blame it on grief but that’s an excuse.

She pressed and pushed and begged, finally and he didn’t sleep with her, though she thinks she knew even going that far wouldn’t have helped much more than his hands under her clothes and his mouth on hers and his fingers slick with her, slipping over her clit, eager and _guilty_ all at once.

They find out four days later. Brother and sister. Blood. They share more than just interest and lust, they shared a womb.

Her black mood matches his.

Valentine is a personal stain on both their lives.

* * *

 

She’s runed and in the lobby of his mother’s practice and she watches her dead best friend’s mom hang hand-shaped turkey decorations and construction paper pilgrims, feathers and gourds, orange and brown glitter glue veined leaves.

No one follows her anymore, they all know where she goes. They disapprove but there are parts of her life she won’t share with them because they’re a part of hers that tainted everything she had before.

* * *

It’s two weeks after they find out Valentine lied. Two weeks is all it takes after the prospect of a lifetime of self-restraint. There’s no familial bond between them, no moral taboo, just the memory of how ashamed they felt for the want that stuck around when they thought they were.

She kisses him and he presses his hands between them to make space.

“This feels weird, still, it isn’t but,” his brow creases like dry desert clay and she draws back, hurt, but hides it, emotions cloud judgement.

“I spent all that time thinking that I let my brother finger me,” she watches him wince at the words, “I decided, after a while that it didn’t matter.”

His forehead smooths out as his eyes go wide.

“I thought that something like that didn’t even matter compared to everything else that’s happened.”

“Clary.” He pleads, he doesn’t want her to stand so close any more.

“I missed you.” She admits before she leaves him alone in the hall.

Later he knocks on her bedroom door, she’s been up, waiting.

* * *

She shuts the gate In the storage room there’s a window and the sun is rising. Camille screams awful things at her. She’d come back alone, she’d known Camille was around. The mission was done and everyone was eating, sleeping, healing, back at the institute.

But she’s in the derelict old public school building waiting for the sun to rise.

The caged room looks like some janitorial, physical education, art class junk yard. Magnus has been teaching her about wards, ones to keep things out, keep them in. She demarcates the threshold of the chain-link gate with spray paint and blood and then she waits for the sun to rise.

Camille says she’s breaking treaties, rules, accords.

Camille turns to orange lace and ash and Clary doesn’t feel better but she doesn’t feel worse.

There’s a lightness, its easier to breathe now in a world where she no longer has a best friend. The best friend she might as well have killed herself through all her indifference. Her inability to pick up the fucking phone.

It’s not pleasant, the weight of guilt and inaction kept her grounded. She stands in the cemetery, stuck like a tied balloon, over where her best friend is buried.

She doesn’t want to stand there, but it’s something people are supposed to do. She thinks about an old idea to write postcard to his mother, pretending to be him, glamor herself and pretend to be his ghost.

It doesn’t seem like something that would help, it would just change the sort of pain his family carries. Her eyes feel swollen. Her face is hot. If she cries it’s because it makes her feel better, it doesn’t actually make her better. It doesn’t absolve anything.

When she returns there’s her new life, waiting, where she left it. Alec chastises her.“You disappeared again.”  He still cares about Jace and her absence is like overcast all over the golden boy.

“I’m here.”

“Jace is looking for you.”

“Then he knows where I am from the cameras.”

Alec sighs. Tells her that isn’t what he meant. She says nothing, she’s too tired for words. She thinks about Camille, dead after so many centuries of being alive, killed over just one person, one person out of so many others.

Clary thinks about how out of ‘so many others’ only she had the nerve to do something.

* * *

They try something benign, watching a movie, but it leavens a sense of intimacy over them that she doesn’t want. It’s too friendly, too warm, to comfortable, familiar to the way things used to be.

She mutes  _Starship Troopers_  and puts herself in his lap and her back to the television. “I don’t want to watch a movie with you.”

Jace grins and something swims hot inside her, need, want, desperation, she wants to feel only his grin and his body, all the weight and heat and strength in his limbs. She wants it to overtake everything. He wants him to help.

* * *

She thinks about how Simon wanted her. She wonders why it never happened. She’d thought about it before, in passing. Left alone, no parents, strolling along together as best friends, the _best_ , it would have been easy. It might have been nice. It could have been better than that.

It would have been better.

But Simon was a necessary death according to people like Maryse.

She doesn’t want concern, she wants the easy flirtation and goading Jace gave to her, once. It’d been familiar. Even that much is too much sometimes, sometimes she wants something else, something so far from everything she’s ever had that she can’t think of anything else.

“There’s a briefing.” Jace says against her mouth, pulling away from her insistent lips.

“Don’t care.”

He grins, promises “It won’t take long.”

“Neither will we,” she assures. He waits to see if she’ll blink first.

She unbuckles his belt, puts her hand inside her jeans, slips it down, holds him by the balls, “Right here, we can be fast.”

His face colors, the flush he always gets as the blood runs south.

* * *

Once when she was little, junior high little, they didn’t walk to school they walked to Central Park, they sat in the sun, ate hot dogs at nine in the morning, were bored by eleven thirty, they had been too scared to walk beyond the same five familiar blocks so they circled around the same bodegas and newsstands, the same graffiti and the same forsaken green bag of dog excrement left next to a stoop.

They had hot pretzels for lunch and shared strawberry lemonade, mouths salty and sweet.

They still had horse carriages that went through the park but they didn’t have enough money to go for a ride they’d never had before. They were natives but the tourism of the city they grew up in never really felt natural.

It wasn’t. Still they went back to school, after final bell. Took the late bus home.

It wasn’t a special day, nothing happened.

It wasn’t a day where truths were revealed, they didn’t really talk.

It wasn’t anything but " _The Day We Skipped School and Went to Central Park"_. At the time she remembers she thought it would have been more exciting.

It wasn’t. But, it’s one of the few days she remembers in absolute clarity. Simon wore a teal polo, khakis, he skipped book mentoring the gradeschoolers, his deodorant smelt like Old Spice, his glasses had blue frames, he was recovering from an awful haircut and too much gel, his braces were still on, red with colorless rubber-bands.

She had an awful pimple, raw and ugly, trying to hide under the fall of her growing out bangs. Her hoodie had some icon of mall goth sentimentality on it, her nail-polish was chipped purple, she had twice read manga in her backpack and a smashed set of little Debbie butterfly shaped snack-cakes in her messenger bag.

It’s an awful day to remember more than all the others.

She remembers only because she thought about what it would be like to kiss a boy with braces. She thought about it the entire day, she mapped out what it would be like if she kissed him, if one day they went to prom, if they lost their virginity together, if they went to the same college, if they stayed best friends forever. She thought about the best kind of her she could be, the kind she wanted to be, right then.

She thought about who she wanted Simon to be.

It’s funny, she thinks, a book about vampires came out that year. They'd both read it and forgot it until the world went crazy for it and suddenly Borders gave it midnight releases the same way it did for Harry Potter. It’s funny in a way that doesn’t make her laugh.

She never did kiss Simon that day, or any other boy who ever wore braces.

Her best friend became a vampire and her father was never really dead and she was born to kill demons and do great things.

It makes her laugh, it’s not even funny.

* * *

She presses herself into a top she can’t fathom ever fit around Isabelle’s breasts. The full length mirror duplicates a girl she’s made herself to be.

“You know, demons love blonds,” Isabelle grins, lascivious and licking a shine over her red pout, “but I can see how redheads might also be a thing.” She pops her gum and Clary pulls a moue in the mirror.

She wears her own boots, not the neck puncture stiletto twins to Isabelle’s by the bedside.

Jace tells them it's time to work, he stares at her reflection. Isabelle rolls her eyes fond and supportive of all flirtation.

Later, her boots leave dirty sole marks in his sweat, the back of his hips turn red from the chafe of her laces, ankles crossed and pulling him closer. Her underwear stick to where she wet and bare underneath.

He’d turned to red-faced bumbling the first time he saw her without the red curls that made her feel equal part woman and little girl, there’s innocence in the littlest of things. But there’s also profanity in the smallest of gestures. Her naked cunt might be one of them whenever his fingers tug at her panties and his touch slips up over her slit.

They’re covered in the internal anatomy of demons turned inside out, he caves, pulls her close, adrenaline, alive, fierce in a dirty alley. He breaks away from her hips against his, her teeth on his lip, “Not like this, Clary.”

She whines, then pleads, “Come on.”

“No. This isn’t what you need now. Come on.”

Her want on his fingers leaves dampness on her thigh.

They go back to the Institute that feels like a life sentence. It is. He undresses her and puts her in a bath.

She wants to be filthy, she doesn’t want his tender hands holding her, a balm on her open wounds, making her clean again.

“I should take one too.” He mumbles to her wet temple as he laves water over her throat, gentle and kind.

“No, I like it.”

His bloody arms, his sweat, his unmade self, hair disheveled, clothes ripped, half-wild, or at least looking it.

“What’s wrong?”

“I feel like I don’t deserve for things to be so quiet, like this.”

She tells him she isn’t in the mood. He looks heartbroken. He goes all the same.

* * *

Alec trains her.

He tells her that her stance is still not wide enough.

She sees the way he still stares at Jace, a habit built up over the years and she viciously wants to tell him how wide it goes around his parabatai’s shoulders. She doesn’t.

Instead she says thank you, corrects her stance and land a roundhouse that jostles him from his perfect, steady stance.

* * *

Isabelle sighs, drawing it out, there’s impatience in the act she puts on but it’s really just discomfiture, she’s never known anything but the Institute or Idris, the Mundane world is only less exciting and interesting when she’s not actually in it.

They wait in line, seen by others.

It gives Clary a thrill, to know she could rune herself, take what she wants and still choosing to be seen. She misses what her life was before.

There’s something in the act of paying for something she wants with money that has no real value in the world she really belongs to. Money, waiting in line, caramel frappes, a new pair of converse sneakers unmarred by demon dust or her own comrades blood, none of that matters to a Shadowhunter. She wonders how much Shadowhunter blood sells for on the warlock market on their long walk back.

The Mundane world is all ritual.

Men take notice of them. Isabelle looks pale. People look at them, their clothes, then they scowl, leer, stare, follow,  or cat-call. Isabelle may have killed demons since before she had her first period but Clary has rode the subway long enough to understand the wise investment of headphones and where best to stand to avoid the perverts whose goals include public ejaculation.

They pass a Sephora whose sample eyeshadow if cultured, would test positive for genital herpes and staph from so many unwashed fingertips dipped inside.

When they return to the institute Isabelle sighs again, “Never again, that was the most boring mission ever.”

On her way from the room Isabelle juts her hip out to push into hers. Clary smiles and seethes. There’s nothing real about the world she lives in. There’s nothing real about the one she left.

 

* * *

Jace doesn’t give her gentleness, she never asked for it. He’s only starting to understand that he doesn’t need to give it, not to her. They shouldn’t have to hide their rage, their hate, at the life they’ve had chosen for them.

He fucks hers and she cries out like she’s dying. It’s better than the half-lives they’ve been leading, forced tenderness, false kindness, idealized versions of themselves.

He’s a killer, she’s a dissident.

Their bodies, runed, nude, scarred, push together in a rhythm that mimics everything they’ve learned, quick, brutal, thrusts that are the end of something, lives led.

Release is a stubborn root that’s tugged out, finally, suddenly, neither of them are braced or grounded for it and it happens. For once there isn’t a ghost between their skin. For once they are real people.

**Author's Note:**

> Does anyone else feel strange using the first lines of a fic for the summary?


End file.
